Travel Awards deadline extended!

Shanghai International Convention Center; overview at sunset; 1999 | Shanghai, China | Image and original data provided by ART on FILE, artonfile.com

We heard you loud and clear and we are extending the deadline to this year’s ARTstor Travel Awards competition until Tuesday, May 28 (the day after Memorial Day Weekend)!

That means you still have two weeks to create an ARTstor image group or groups and a single essay of 500 words or less that creatively introduces us to a city or cities we did not know or reveals an intriguing aspect of the cities we do know.

Five applicants will win $1,500 each to help support educational and scholarly travel activities (such as flying to a conference). College and graduate students, scholars, curators, educators, and librarians in any field associated with institutions that subscribe to the ARTstor Digital Library are eligible to apply.

Learn more at artstor.org/travelawards.

To view the complete image groups for the Travel Awards-winning essays, visit the ARTstor Digital Library’s Featured Groups and click on Travel Awards.

Fashion from the Great Gatsby’s roaring twenties

Left: Jeanne Lanvin | Ensemble, Evening; Summer 1923. Right: Jeanne Lanvin | Suit, Evening (Tuxedo); 1927. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The recent movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby has turned the spotlight on the fashion and styles of the Roaring Twenties. So what made the twenties roar?

The economic boom was decisive. Soldiers came home from World War I to jobs in manufacturing plants ready to turn from war production to consumer goods; with the flourishing economy, many commodities became affordable for the first time. Another key engine for progress was the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It was signed into law in 1920, heralding unprecedented liberation. The twenties were also a pivotal time for mass communication: radio, cinema, and the automobile sped up the distribution of information—and trends.

Meet ARTstor and Shared Shelf staff at SUNY CIT 2013

The Conference on Instruction and Technology (SUNY CIT) Conference
May 21-24, 2013
SUNY Institute of Technology, GPS – 5701 Horatio St., Utica, NY

Drop by our booth and meet Rebecca Shows, Implementation Manager, and Sian Evans, Sr. Library Relations, to learn about Shared Shelf, ARTstor’s media management software.

More details at the SUNY CIT Conference website.

Now available: Installation images from the Guggenheim Museum in New York City

David Heald, photographer | Frank Gehry: Architect | May 18 – September 4, 2001 | Photograph: © 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

The ARTstor Digital Library and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have collaborated to share nearly 5,500 installation views spanning from 1990’s to the present from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The images in this release include documentation of seminal exhibitions such as: Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective; The Worlds of Nam June Paik; James Rosenquist: A Retrospective; Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle; and Kandinsky.

May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly

Alfred Jacob Miller | Roasting The Hump Rib, 1858-1860 | The Walters Art Museum

May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly. Why the hedging? Because the closest to an official citation we could find was this post on the USDA blog from 2012. But we’ll go with it because a) it gives us the excuse to post this mid-19th century watercolor from The Walters Art Museum, b) we like barbecue, and c) it’s close to lunchtime.

View this image in the ARTstor Digital Library to read the metadata, which includes the artist’s mouthwatering description of how the ribs are cooked.

Celebrating National Bike Month

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec | La Chaine Simpson (bicycle chains), 1896 | Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

May is National Bike Month! Did you know that there are more than a billion bicycles worldwide? Perhaps more surprisingly, the basic configuration of a bicycle hasn’t changed much from the chain-driven model developed around 1885.

Amed T. Thibault | Bicycle, Livery, Carriage, and Paint Shop Trade Sign, 1895-1905 | American Folk Art Museum; folkartmuseum.org

The first pedal-propelled bicycle was reputedly invented by Kirkpatrick MacMillan in Scotland in 1839. While not everyone agrees on his breakthrough, it is widely accepted that MacMillan was the first person to be charged with a cycling traffic offense in 1842 after he was fined five shillings for knocking over a little girl.

In the early 1860s, bicycle design was improved in France by a crank drive with pedals and a larger front wheel that allowed the rider to travel farther with every rotation of the pedals. The model soon developed into the “penny-farthing,” which boasted wheels with solid rubber tires mounted on a tubular steel frame. While certainly formidable-looking, the high placement of the seat and the poor weight distribution made it difficult to ride.

Butterfly sightings in the ARTstor Digital Library

Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Collected: 8/1975, Madagascar, Africa | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Spring time is here and butterflies are already making their annual appearance, according to butterfliesandmoths.org. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a slide show of selections from a wide variety of eras, regions, and fields of study, from science to art to costume design.

Search the ARTstor Digital Library for butterfl* to find more than 1,000 images with the keywords “butterfly” or “butterflies.”

Butterfly Collector | ca. 1850 | George Eastman House; eastmanhouse.org

Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Papua New Guinea, Australia | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Collected: 9/1913, Assam State, India | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Ypthima sesara; nymphalid butterfly | Collected: 12/19/1963, Vita Levu., Fiji Islands | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Morpho Hecuba, nymphalid butterfly | Collected: 9/1952, Para State, Brazil | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Jean Jacques Bachelier | White angora cat chasing a butterfly, 2nd half 18th Century | Musée Lambinet | Réunion des Musées Nationaux

Strobridge Lithograph | Forepaugh-Sells Enormous Shows United: The Ty-Bell Sisters, Aerial Butterflies, 1910 | The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: Circus Collection; ringling.org/CircusMuseums

Alexander Bening | Hours of Queen Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain: fol. 25 (recto) | c. 1495-1500 | The Cleveland Museum of Art

French Worth | Evening Dress, 1898 | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

German | Bonnet | second half 19th century | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Click on any image to view the slide show and to read the full captions.

Our slide show includes an image of a very serious-looking butterfly collector from George Eastman House; several examples from the nearly 70 specimens of butterflies in Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History; an 18^th-century painting of a mischievous cat chasing a butterfly from Réunion des Musées Nationaux; a 1910 lithograph of the Ty-Bell Sisters, Aerial Butterflies from The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Circus Collection; a colorful illumination from the Book of Hours of Queen Isabella I, ca. 1495-1500, from The Cleveland Museum of Art Collection; and an evening dress and a bonnet from more than two dozen butterfly-themed dresses and accessories in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Brooklyn Museum Costumes.